Iptraf had its problems and I like the simplicity of the network stats screen under 038 but I REALLY miss the Bits Per Second display that Iptraf gave

My ISP sometimes applies arbitary caps on customers and sometimes the bit of wet string that is the ADSL link dries out and it would be nice to be able to get a rapid display of the current rating when I'm shouting at them over the phone

Is there a simple tool/package/script around that would display the bits/sec for eth0 and update it once per second??

There is an inherent problem with really doing accurately what you are asking and that is the fact that 2.0.x kernels don't actually have a mechanism for counting bytes. You can assume that each packet is completely full and then do the math from there. But that is just a high guess for the actual transfer rate. But I will do some looking into what would be involved with adding a guessed transfer rate into the built in system for 0.3.9

However there is nothing stopping you from running iptraf on 038 and the built in network monitor can just be disabled in the advanced setup so that you can run iptraf on screen 5 and even as a daemon if you want from within the rc_user start) section.

If you are afraid that you might make a mistake. The chances are high that you will never learn anything.

it runs silently in background and outputs to text files, so you need another simple script to display the results on a console. Its PHP companion is <a href='http://scripfm.sourceforge.net/' target='_blank'>http://scripfm.sourceforge.net/</a>

But I will do some looking into what would be involved with adding a guessed transfer rate into the built in system for 0.3.9

It looks like this will be a reality in 0.3.9.

justdave has created the necessary code to include this into the system. So there will be the transmit and receive rates included in the network monitor on screen 6. As for it's actual accuracy, that is another story because the real packet overhead versus data is just a guess.

If you are afraid that you might make a mistake. The chances are high that you will never learn anything.